Background Essay

Background essay for Lecture 3 · PHIL 210 World Religions · Steven Austin

Man’s Inhumanity to Man: The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Problem of Human Evil

Homo homini lupus. (Plautus, Asinaria)¹

1. A hanging at Buna

1.1 The boy on the gallows

In the summer of 1944 a fifteen-year-old boy from Sighet, Romania, named Eliezer Wiesel was a prisoner in Buna, the labor camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz. One evening, after a work detail, the SS assembled the prisoners on the parade ground. Three gallows stood there. Three prisoners were to be hanged for sabotage: two men and a boy, a pipel, a young servant of one of the block chiefs, whom Wiesel describes as having the face of a sad angel. The prisoners were made to watch, and then to march past the bodies and look at them.

The two men died quickly. The boy was so light that the rope did not break his neck. Wiesel writes that he hung between life and death for more than half an hour while the prisoners filed past him. Behind Wiesel, a man asked where God was. The question came again as the boy struggled. And Wiesel heard a voice inside himself answer: God is here, hanging on this gallows.² [verify: quote the exchange only from the 2006 Marion Wiesel translation, Night, pp. 64–65; this essay paraphrases it.]

That evening the soup tasted of corpses, he writes. A few months later, on Rosh Hashanah, while ten thousand prisoners prayed, he refused to bless God’s name. He did not stop believing that God existed. He stopped believing that God was just, and he was furious.

1.2 From “what” to “why”

The first two lectures of this unit asked what happened. Lecture 1 traced how a modern state turned an old hatred into ghettos, shooting pits, and gas chambers. Lecture 2 widened the lens to a century of genocide and ended with faces: a telegraph clerk, a mathematics teacher, a schoolteacher who protected his town for eleven days and then urged his neighbors to kill. The images you saw showed what human beings did to other human beings, often to people they knew.

This lecture asks the question the man behind Wiesel asked. It is really two questions. The first is about God: if God is good and all-powerful, how could God allow this? The second is about us: how could ordinary people do it? The religions of the world have mostly answered the first question, and their answers lead us to the second. That is where philosophy comes in, and where this lecture ends.

1.3 Naming the problem

The first question has a name. In 1710 the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published a book called Theodicy, from two Greek words, theos, “God,” and dikē, “justice.” A theodicy is an attempt to justify God’s ways in the face of evil. Leibniz famously argued that, all things considered, God had created the best of all possible worlds.³

The problem itself is far older. It is often put as a triangle of three claims: God is all-good; God is all-powerful; evil exists. Any two can be held together comfortably. Holding all three is the problem. If God is good and cannot stop evil, God is not all-powerful. If God can stop it and will not, is God good? The classic form of this dilemma is credited to the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE), but no writing of his containing it survives. It comes to us through the Christian writer Lactantius, around 313 CE, who attributes it to Epicurus in order to answer it.⁴ So we should say “attributed to Epicurus.”

Seventy years before Auschwitz, a novelist had already put the problem in its sharpest form. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the brilliant skeptic Ivan Karamazov tells his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk, story after story of children tortured by adults. In the chapter called “Rebellion” (Book 5, chapter 4) he grants that God may exist and that at the end of time there may be a universal harmony in which everything is explained. He refuses it anyway. He rejects justifying the children’s suffering by a future or heavenly harmony, because no harmony is worth the tears of one tortured child. “It isn’t God I don’t accept, Alyosha,” he says; “I am only most respectfully returning Him the ticket.”⁵ Ivan’s test anticipates Irving Greenberg’s principle after the Holocaust: no statement should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children (see section 2.3).

After Auschwitz the triangle stopped being a classroom exercise. The question was no longer whether there is evil in the world but whether any account of God can stand next to a child on a gallows.

1.4 The oldest argument: Job

The Book of Job begins like a folk tale. Job is a wealthy man in the land of Uz, “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1, NRSV). In the heavenly court, “the satan,” the accuser, suggests that Job is good only because God has made him prosperous. God permits a test. In one day Job loses his livestock, his servants, and his ten children. Then he is struck with sores from head to foot.

Three friends come to comfort him, and for most of the book they argue. Their position is simple: God is just, so suffering must be punishment, so Job must have sinned. Job insists he has not, and demands that God answer him. Finally God speaks “out of the whirlwind” (38:1): “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding” (38:4). God never explains the wager. God shows Job the size and strangeness of creation, and Job falls silent.

Yet at the end God turns to the friends: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (42:7). The protester was right; the defenders of easy justice were wrong. The book refuses the idea that suffering is always deserved. That is why Wiesel and other post-Holocaust writers return to it.

Two other biblical resources mattered to Jews long before 1945. The Akedah, the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), became in medieval Jewish memory a model for martyrdom, especially after the Rhineland massacres of the First Crusade in 1096. The Book of Lamentations mourns the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in 587 BCE and is read every year on the fast of Tisha B’Av. Both gave Jews a language for catastrophe; neither offered an explanation.

2. Jewish responses after Auschwitz

The Holocaust fundamentally transformed modern Judaism, particularly Jewish theology, religious identity, and understandings of God’s relationship with the Jewish people. Its effects were so profound that scholars frequently distinguish between pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust Jewish theology.

The central theological question was not simply why God permits suffering. Jews had wrestled with that question for thousands of years. The Holocaust raised something more devastating:

How could the God of Israel, who established a covenant with the Jewish people and repeatedly promised to preserve them, remain silent while six million Jews were systematically murdered?

The resulting theological crisis produced some of the most radical developments in Jewish thought since the Enlightenment. Importantly, however, Jews did not arrive at one answer. Some abandoned traditional ideas about God, others reinterpreted the covenant, and still others reaffirmed Jewish religious life while refusing to explain the catastrophe.

2.1 The crisis of God, covenant, and divine providence

Three foundational Jewish beliefs were profoundly challenged.

God’s providence: Traditional Judaism generally understands God as actively involved in history, although Jewish thinkers have long disagreed about the nature of that involvement. The Holocaust raised the possibility that God either could not intervene, chose not to intervene, or did not exist as traditionally understood.

The covenant: If God entered into an enduring covenant with Israel, what did that covenant mean after Auschwitz? Could Jews continue to believe in a special covenantal relationship when Jewish children, religious scholars, and entire communities had been exterminated?

The meaning of suffering: Biblical and rabbinic traditions sometimes interpreted national catastrophe in relation to punishment, repentance, or covenantal failure. Many post-Holocaust thinkers argued that applying those explanations to the Holocaust was morally intolerable because it implied that the victims somehow deserved their fate.

This last development was particularly significant. It contributed to what scholars call antitheodicy: the refusal to justify innocent suffering by claiming it serves a divine purpose.⁶

2.2 Wiesel: faith, doubt, and protest

The Holocaust did not produce a uniform decline in religious belief. Some survivors lost faith, some maintained their religious commitments, and others found renewed meaning in observance, prayer, and rebuilding Jewish communities.

Wiesel survived. He went to France after the war, became a journalist, and kept silent about the camps for about ten years. Night appeared first as a long Yiddish memoir in 1956 and then in a much shorter French version, La Nuit, in 1958.⁷ Night is his memoir of deportation from Sighet through Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and of his father’s death. It became one of the most-read books about the Holocaust.

The writings of Elie Wiesel are especially important here. His memoir Night describes a devastating crisis of religious faith. But Wiesel’s later writings often continued to engage God through accusation, questioning, and protest rather than simply dismissing faith altogether.

This reflects a longstanding Jewish tradition, found in Job and the Psalms, of arguing with God. After Auschwitz, however, that tradition acquired new intensity.

His play The Trial of God (1979) puts this into drama. It is set in a Ukrainian village in 1649, after a massacre of Jews, where three wandering minstrels arrive on the festival of Purim and stage a trial with God as the defendant. No one will take God’s defense except a mysterious stranger, who turns out not to be who he seems.⁸ Wiesel said the play grew out of something he had witnessed as a boy in the camp: three learned Jews who put God on trial one night and found him guilty, and then, because it was time, went to evening prayers. The story is often repeated, but it rests on Wiesel’s own later recollection, and Wiesel told it in slightly different ways over the years.⁹ Treat it as his memory, not as a documented event.

A crucial theological development was the growing insistence that protest against God could itself be an authentic expression of Jewish faith. Believers need not explain or justify God’s silence to remain Jewish.

2.3 Four major theological responses

The differences among four influential thinkers illustrate how dramatically Jewish theology changed.

Richard Rubenstein (1924–2021)

After Auschwitz (1966). Response: The traditional God of history is no longer credible.

In August 1961 a young American rabbi named Richard Rubenstein met with Heinrich Grüber, a Protestant dean in West Berlin. Grüber was no Nazi. He had helped Jews escape, he had been sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau for it, and he had testified at the Eichmann trial. But in conversation he told Rubenstein that the Holocaust had been part of God’s plan for the Jews, that God had used Hitler as he had once used Nebuchadnezzar.¹⁰

Rubenstein left that meeting convinced that he could no longer believe in the God of covenant and history, the God who chooses a people and acts in its history to reward and punish. If that God existed, then Auschwitz was God’s will, and Rubenstein would not say that. In After Auschwitz (1966) he wrote that we live in the time of the “death of God,” borrowing a phrase made famous by Nietzsche and by Christian theologians of the 1960s.¹¹ Rubenstein put the choice starkly. Either God had willed Auschwitz, as Grüber said, or the traditional picture of a God who rewards and punishes in history was false. A kind, brave man who had risked his life for Jews had followed the old theology to its logical end, and the end was monstrous. That, for Rubenstein, was the proof that the theology had to go. He wrote that we live in a cold, silent universe, indifferent to human purposes, and that Jews must face this honestly rather than hide behind explanations that make the victims responsible for their own deaths. [verify any direct wording before quoting]

Rubenstein argued that Auschwitz shattered belief in an omnipotent God who directs history and protects Israel. His approach became associated with Jewish “death of God” theology, although he did not simply reject every possible understanding of the divine. Jewish ritual and communal identity could still possess meaning without traditional providence.

He compared Judaism in this new situation to the religions of the earth, rooted in the cycle of birth and death, community and land, rather than in a story of history moving toward a goal. Many Jews were scandalized. Rubenstein later softened some of his claims, but his book made it impossible to discuss God after the Holocaust as though nothing had happened.

Eliezer Berkovits (1908–1992)

Faith After the Holocaust (1973). Response: God remains present but conceals his face.

Berkovits drew upon the biblical concept of hester panim, the hiding of God’s face. A world containing genuine human freedom must permit humans to commit terrible evil. God’s nonintervention does not necessarily mean abandonment, although this explanation leaves painful questions about innocent suffering.

The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 31:17–18. For Berkovits, God’s power shows itself in self-restraint: the price of human freedom is that human beings can commit Auschwitz. He did not think this made the suffering acceptable; faith, he held, had to live with the question.

Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003)

First proposed in 1967 (published in Commentary, 1968) and developed in God’s Presence in History (1970). Response: Jewish survival itself becomes a sacred obligation.

Emil Fackenheim had been arrested in Germany after Kristallnacht in November 1938 and held in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before he escaped. He became a rabbi and a philosopher in Canada. For years he argued that no historical event could challenge faith. Then, in the 1960s, he concluded that Auschwitz did.

Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments in the Torah. In 1967 Fackenheim proposed a 614th, heard, he said, as a “commanding Voice” from Auschwitz.¹² Fackenheim formulated the famous metaphorical 614th commandment: Jews must not grant Hitler a posthumous victory. His response emphasized preserving Jewish existence, remembering the victims, maintaining hope, and continuing Judaism despite the catastrophe.

Fackenheim arrived at this through a long reckoning with tradition. Jewish faith, he argued, had always rested on what he called root experiences, events like the Exodus and the giving of the Torah at Sinai, in which the Jewish people believed God had acted and spoken. Auschwitz was a different kind of event: an epoch-making event that no previous framework could absorb. It could not be fitted into the old pattern of sin and punishment, which would make the murdered children guilty, and it could not be ignored. The only honest response was neither explanation nor silence but obedience to what the event itself seemed to demand.

He pointed out something many observers had noticed: secular Jews who believed in nothing in particular still refused to stop being Jews after 1945, still married Jews, still raised Jewish children. Fackenheim saw that refusal as a kind of hearing of the commanding Voice, even by people who did not believe in a God who speaks.

Fackenheim did not explain Auschwitz. He refused to explain it. What he offered was a response: the Jewish people’s continued existence, including the founding of the State of Israel, as an act of defiance. Rubenstein said the God of history had died. Fackenheim said that whatever God’s silence meant, to give up would be to finish Hitler’s work.

Irving Greenberg (born 1933)

Voluntary Covenant theology. Response: The covenant continues, but its nature has changed.

Greenberg argued that, after Auschwitz, God’s covenant with the Jewish people could no longer be understood as an unconditional demand for obedience. Jewish participation becomes increasingly voluntary, a partnership freely renewed rather than simply imposed.

Greenberg, an American Orthodox rabbi, also proposed, in an address given in New York in the early 1970s and published in 1977, a “working principle” for theology after the Holocaust: “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.”¹³ He had in mind the Hungarian Jewish children thrown alive into fire pits at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. He also spoke of “moment faiths,” moments when faith is possible and moments when it is not.

These thinkers disagreed profoundly, yet all treated the Holocaust as a challenge that serious Jewish theology could not ignore.

2.4 The Holocaust also changed the understanding of God’s power

One particularly radical development was the suggestion that perhaps God was not omnipotent in the traditional sense.

Philosopher Hans Jonas argued that God had voluntarily surrendered the power to control everything in creation. Drawing upon the mystical concept of tzimtzum, divine withdrawal or contraction, Jonas suggested that God did not prevent Auschwitz because God no longer possessed unlimited power to intervene.

This differed fundamentally from Berkovits’s argument. For Berkovits, God could intervene but ordinarily refrained to preserve human freedom. For Jonas, divine nonintervention reflected an actual limitation of God’s power.

Jonas (1903–1993), whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz, set out this view in a 1984 lecture, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz.” He proposed a God who, in creating a free world, gave up power, so that God suffers with the world but cannot intervene. Jonas chose to keep God’s goodness and give up God’s omnipotence: one corner of the triangle removed.

Thus, the Holocaust inspired Jewish thinkers to reconsider not only God’s goodness but the very nature of divinity.

2.5 Jewish identity and religious life were transformed

The Holocaust destroyed not simply millions of individual lives but much of the institutional and cultural foundation of European Judaism.

Before 1933, approximately 60% of the world’s Jews lived in Europe. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered about two-thirds of European Jewry. Thousands of religious communities, synagogues, schools, and centers of Jewish learning were destroyed.¹⁴

The consequences extended well beyond theology.

Israel and the United States became the principal centers of Jewish life. Communities rebuilt religious schools, synagogues, yeshivas, and Hasidic institutions. Preserving traditions and transmitting them to the next generation acquired particular urgency.

Jewish survival became an ethical and religious imperative. In Fackenheim’s influential formulation, continuing to live as Jews was itself a refusal to allow Nazi extermination to achieve its ultimate goal.

Remembrance became more formally integrated into Jewish communal life. Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorates the victims and Jewish resistance. Israel’s Knesset set its date, 27 Nisan, in 1951 and passed the Yom HaShoah law in 1959. Jewish communities developed memorial services, prayers, educational programs, and other practices of remembrance.

Not all religious authorities agreed on how to commemorate the catastrophe. Some preferred incorporating Holocaust mourning into Tisha B’Av, the traditional day commemorating historical Jewish calamities, rather than establishing a distinct observance.

2.6 The Holocaust changed Jewish understandings of Israel and redemption

The relationship between the Holocaust and the founding of Israel in 1948 became central to postwar Jewish thought.

Modern political Zionism began decades before the Holocaust. However, Nazi genocide intensified support for Jewish sovereignty among many Jews who believed that statelessness had left their communities dangerously vulnerable.

This produced competing theological interpretations.

Some religious Zionists saw Israel’s establishment as a sign of divine redemption following catastrophe. Others rejected the idea that Jewish mass murder could be justified as a necessary stage toward the creation of a Jewish state.

The philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz was especially critical of interpreting political events as proof of God’s providential purposes. He argued for separating religious faith from claims that a state or historical victory was inherently sacred.

The larger shift was that Jewish survival, political independence, and the ethical exercise of power became interconnected theological questions.

2.7 Jewish-Christian relations were fundamentally reconsidered

The Holocaust forced a reassessment of centuries of Christian anti-Judaism, including teachings that portrayed Jews as rejected by God or collectively responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion.

The Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate (1965) was a major turning point. It rejected collective Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ death and decried “hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” It helped establish a new foundation for Catholic-Jewish dialogue, although that reconciliation has remained an ongoing and sometimes difficult process.¹⁵

For Jewish theologians, questions about Christianity became inseparable from questions of Jewish identity, historical responsibility, and whether meaningful theological reconciliation was possible after Auschwitz.

2.8 Perhaps the deepest change: the rejection of easy theological answers

There is a fundamental difference between trying to explain the Holocaust and deciding how Judaism should respond to it.

Earlier Jewish traditions sometimes understood collective catastrophe through divine punishment or providential purpose. Some post-Holocaust religious thinkers retained versions of those explanations, but others challenged them as ethically indefensible.

A powerful current in modern Jewish theology therefore rejects attempts to rationalize the murder of innocent people. It emphasizes memory, human responsibility, covenantal renewal, and resistance to evil rather than claiming to know why God permitted genocide.

This does not mean that all modern Jews accepted antitheodicy. Traditional Orthodox approaches, secular Jewish interpretations, and radical theological responses continue to coexist.

2.9 Overall significance

The most important distinction is between Judaism’s traditional problem of suffering and the particular crisis created by Auschwitz.

Before the Holocaust, Jewish thinkers could draw upon centuries of reflection on exile, persecution, covenant, and redemption. After the Holocaust, many theologians questioned whether those inherited frameworks could still be maintained without fundamental revision.

The Holocaust did not end Jewish theology. It forced some of its central questions to be reopened.

One useful way to frame the theological transformation is through one fundamental contrast:

Traditional theodicy asks: How can we reconcile God’s goodness with the suffering of the Jewish people?

Much post-Holocaust Jewish theology asks: Can we continue a relationship with God without ever reconciling ourselves to what happened at Auschwitz?

That second question captures the importance of Wiesel, Fackenheim, Greenberg, and the broader movement toward antitheodicy.

For further reading, two particularly useful works are Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America and (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought. The first surveys the major thinkers; the second offers a sustained examination of the rejection of traditional theodicy.¹⁶

3. Christian answers, and other traditions

3.1 Augustine: evil as a hole

Christian thinkers had wrestled with the problem for fifteen centuries before Auschwitz, and the most influential answer came from a North African bishop. As a young man Augustine of Hippo (354–430) belonged for nine years to the Manichaeans, a religion that taught that the world is a battlefield between two equal powers, one good and one evil. It seemed to explain why the world is so mixed.

Augustine’s own story is told in the Confessions, which is really a long prayer addressed to God. He grew up in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, the son of a pagan father and a devout Christian mother, Monica. He was brilliant and ambitious. He studied rhetoric in Carthage, lived for years with a woman he never married, and fathered a son. He tells us that as a teenager he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor’s tree, not because they were hungry, since they threw most of them to the pigs, but simply for the pleasure of doing what was forbidden. Decades later that small theft still troubled him. Why would anyone choose wrong just because it is wrong? It was the problem of evil in miniature, inside himself.

He moved to Rome and then to Milan as a professor of rhetoric. There he heard the sermons of Bishop Ambrose and began to read the Platonists. In the summer of 386, in a garden in Milan, in tears over his inability to change his life, he heard a child’s voice from a nearby house chanting “take up and read,” opened a copy of Paul’s letters, and read a passage in Romans that turned him around. He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387. [verify: confirm the garden-scene details against Confessions 8.12.29 before quoting]

Augustine eventually rejected the Manichaeans entirely. In the Confessions (about 397–400) he tells how, through reading Platonist philosophers, he came to see that evil is not a substance or a power at all.¹⁷ Everything God made is good. Evil is a privation, a lack or corruption of a good that should be there, the way blindness is the absence of sight or a hole is the absence of cloth. Evil has no independent existence; it is a parasite on the good.

Then where does it come from? Augustine’s answer, worked out in On Free Choice of the Will, is the will of free creatures. God made angels and human beings free, because a creature that can only obey is not capable of love. Freedom includes the ability to turn away from the highest good, God, toward lesser goods: pride, possession, power. That turning is sin, and the suffering of the world flows from it. On this view the gallows at Buna is not God’s work. It is human work, the work of wills turned away from the good.

3.2 Irenaeus, read by Hick

A second Christian tradition looks back to Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyon in Gaul around 180. In Against Heresies (Book IV) Irenaeus suggested that human beings were not created finished and perfect, but immature, like children, and that they must grow toward the likeness of God through experience, including the experience of hardship.¹⁸

In 1966 the British philosopher John Hick built on this idea in Evil and the God of Love. Hick called the world a “vale of soul-making,” a phrase he borrowed from a letter of the poet John Keats, not from Irenaeus.¹⁹ The view is a theodicy: this is how some Christians justify God’s permitting evil. A world without pain or danger, Hick argued, would produce no courage, compassion, or moral strength. Souls are made, not born. Hick admitted that no amount of growth could make sense of suffering on the scale of Auschwitz in this life, and he looked to a life beyond death for its completion. Critics answered that a child on a gallows is not being made into anything.

3.3 Ivan’s rebellion: The Brothers Karamazov

Hick’s most formidable critic was not a theologian but a character in a novel. Section 1 introduced Ivan Karamazov’s image of returning the ticket. Here is the whole scene, which many readers consider the most powerful statement of the problem of evil ever written.

The Brothers Karamazov (1880) was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last novel. It tells of a coarse, greedy father, Fyodor Karamazov, and his three sons: Dmitri, passionate and reckless; Ivan, an educated intellectual; and Alyosha, the youngest, a novice in the local monastery under a beloved elder, Father Zosima. In Book 5, “Pro and Contra,” Ivan and Alyosha meet in a tavern. Ivan, who is about to leave town, wants for once to talk to his brother about the things that matter.

Ivan begins by saying he accepts God. What he cannot accept is God’s world. Then he tells stories, collected, he says, from newspapers and histories. Turkish soldiers in Bulgaria who tossed babies in the air and caught them on bayonets in front of their mothers. A well-educated couple who beat their five-year-old daughter and locked her on freezing nights in an outhouse, where she wept and prayed to “dear little God” to protect her. And a retired general on his estate, with kennels of hundreds of hounds, whose favorite hound was hurt in the paw by a stone thrown in play by a serf boy of eight. The general had the boy locked up overnight, then in the morning, before the household and the boy’s mother, had him stripped and made to run, and set the hounds on him. They tore him to pieces before his mother’s eyes.²⁰

Ivan does not deny that suffering might one day be explained. Perhaps, he says, at the end of time the mother will embrace the torturer who had her son torn apart by dogs, and all three will cry out with tears, “You are just, O Lord!”²¹ But he refuses to join in. A higher harmony, he says, “is not worth one little tear of even that one tortured child,” because the child’s tears remain unatoned for.²² “I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong.” And then: “Besides, they have priced harmony too high; paying so much for admission is quite beyond our means.” So, as we saw in section 1, he hands back his entrance ticket. “That is rebellion,” Alyosha said quietly, looking down.²³

Ivan then presses Alyosha. Imagine, he says, that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny, to make people happy in the end and give them peace and rest at last, but that to do it you must “torture to death just one tiny creature” and found the edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you agree to be the architect on those terms? “No, I would not,” Alyosha said quietly.²⁴

Next Ivan recites a “poem” he has composed, “The Grand Inquisitor” (Book 5, chapter 5). In sixteenth-century Seville, Christ returns, and the aged Cardinal Inquisitor has him arrested. At night the Inquisitor visits his prisoner and explains why the church has corrected Christ’s work: human beings cannot bear the freedom Christ offered them; they want bread, miracle, and authority, and the church has given them these in his name. Christ listens in silence. At the end, as Ivan tells it, “he suddenly, in silence, approaches the old man and quietly kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips. That is the whole answer.” The old man shudders, opens the door, and lets him go.²⁵

When Ivan finishes, he asks whether Alyosha will renounce him. Alyosha gets up and kisses him on the lips. “Literary theft!” Ivan cries, suddenly elated. “You stole that from my poem!”²⁶ Alyosha does not refute Ivan. He answers the way Christ answered the Inquisitor, with love.

Dostoevsky knew Ivan’s argument was strong; he wrote to his editor that the next book was meant as its answer. [verify: Dostoevsky to N. A. Lyubimov, 1879] That answer, in Book 6, “The Russian Monk,” is not an argument but a life: the teachings of the dying Father Zosima. Zosima tells of his older brother Markel, who died young and who, near the end, told their mother that “each of us is guilty before everyone, for everything, and I more than all.” Zosima made those words the heart of his teaching. Earlier in the novel, in his last words to the monks (Book 4, chapter 1), he says that a monk’s goal is reached only when he realizes that he is “guilty before all people, for all and for everything, for all human sins, of the world and of each one.”²⁷ Instead of standing outside the world and judging God for it, Zosima calls people to take responsibility for its suffering through active love. Whether that answers Ivan is something readers have argued about ever since.

Hick took Ivan seriously in Evil and the God of Love. He accepted that no theodicy could make a tortured child’s suffering acceptable in itself, and he did not claim to justify any particular horror. His soul-making view could only argue that a world in which real persons are formed in freedom requires a real possibility of terrible evil, and that the final good God brings about, beyond this life, will be so great that it will be seen to have made the whole process worthwhile. Hick admitted that this answer could be judged only from the end, and that Ivan’s protest remains the strongest objection to it.²⁸ [verify Hick’s discussion of Ivan, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed., chs. 16–17]

3.4 A word about Christianity’s own record

Christian answers to the problem of evil come with a difficulty that Jewish answers do not: Christianity’s own long history of hostility toward Jews, which Lecture 1 traced as one root of modern antisemitism. For many Christian theologians after 1945 the question was not only “where was God?” but “where were the Christians?”

3.5 Bonhoeffer: a pastor in prison

A few Christians did resist. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 into a distinguished Berlin family and became a Lutheran pastor and theologian while still in his twenties. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer spoke against the Nazi takeover of the German Protestant churches and against laws that pushed Christians of Jewish descent out of the ministry. He helped lead the Confessing Church, which refused to accept Nazi control, and he ran an illegal seminary for its pastors until the Gestapo shut it down.

During the war Bonhoeffer went further. Through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi he joined the circle in German military intelligence that was plotting against Hitler, and he used his church contacts abroad to tell the Allies about the resistance. He helped smuggle a small group of Jews to Switzerland. He was arrested in April 1943. After the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, the Gestapo found documents linking him to the conspiracy. On April 9, 1945, a few weeks before the war in Europe ended, he was hanged at the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

From his cell in Berlin’s Tegel prison he wrote letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge that were later published as Letters and Papers from Prison. In one of them, dated July 16, 1944, he wrote: “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.” A few lines later: “The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.”²⁹ Bonhoeffer was not offering a tidy explanation. He was saying that the Christian God is not a power who stands above suffering and arranges it, but one who enters it.

3.6 Moltmann: a soldier who saw the pictures

Jürgen Moltmann was born in Hamburg in 1926 into a secular family. At sixteen he was drafted as an anti-aircraft auxiliary and in July 1943 survived the firestorm bombing of his city, in which the friend standing next to him was killed. He later served as a soldier and surrendered to British troops in 1945. In a prisoner-of-war camp he and other German prisoners were shown photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. He said later that he and his fellow prisoners were overwhelmed with shame. In a British camp he was given a Bible by a chaplain and began to read the psalms of lament and the story of the crucifixion, and he found in them a God who understood the abandoned.³⁰ [verify details against Moltmann’s autobiography, A Broad Place (2008)]

Moltmann became one of the most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. In The Crucified God (1972) he argued that the cross means God is not untouched by suffering: God suffers in and with the crucified Jesus, and so stands with every victim. And he quoted the scene that opened this lecture. Moltmann cited Wiesel’s gallows at Buna and the voice that answered, “Here he is—he is hanging here on this gallows” [verify: Moltmann quotes an earlier English translation of Night; confirm wording in The Crucified God, ch. 6], and said that any other answer would be blasphemy.³¹

Many Jewish readers objected. Wiesel’s line was a cry of accusation, perhaps the death of faith, not a Christian theology of the cross. Moltmann took the scene as a picture of a God who suffers with the victims. The same scene, read by a Jewish survivor and a German former soldier, points in two different directions, and both readings are still argued over.

3.7 Islamic answers

The Qur’an addresses suffering as trial. God “created death and life to test you [people] and reveal which of you does best” (67:2), and “We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives, and crops” (2:155), with good news for those who, when disaster strikes, say “We belong to God and to Him we shall return” (2:156).³² [verify all three against M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, trans., The Qur’an (Oxford World’s Classics, 2004).] Suffering is not proof that God is unjust; it is the arena in which faith and patience (sabr) are tested, and final justice belongs to the Day of Judgment.

The Qur’an also tells the story of human evil’s origin. When God commands the angels to bow to Adam, Iblis refuses, out of pride: he claims he is better, made of fire while Adam is made of clay (2:34; 7:11–18). He vows to lead human beings astray, and God allows it until the Day of Judgment. Evil here begins in arrogance, and human beings remain responsible for whether they follow it.

Muslim theologians debated how far human beings are free. The Mu’tazila insisted on human free will to protect God’s justice; the Ash’arites stressed God’s absolute power and spoke of human beings “acquiring” acts that God creates. Both sides agreed that God is just and human beings accountable.

Finally, Qur’an 5:32 is often quoted against mass murder: whoever kills a soul, unless for murder or corruption in the land, it is as though he had killed all mankind; and whoever saves a life, as though he had saved all mankind. Read it in context: it is addressed as a ruling given to the Children of Israel, following the story of Cain and Abel. It closely parallels a teaching in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5).

3.8 Hindu and Buddhist answers: karma

In Hindu traditions, karma means action and its consequences. Every action leaves an imprint that ripens, in this life or a later one, within the cycle of rebirth, samsara. Suffering is therefore not the arbitrary act of a creator but the fruit of past action. This moves the problem away from God’s justice: there is no all-powerful judge who could have prevented it, only a moral order that works like a law of nature. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna to act according to his duty without attachment to the fruits of action, a teaching about how to act in a world shaped by karma.

Buddhism, which has no creator God, has no theodicy in the Western sense. The Buddha taught that life is marked by dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness, which arises from craving. The roots of harmful action are three: greed, hatred, and delusion. Evil is not a cosmic power but a condition of the untrained mind, and it can be uprooted through the path of ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom.

Karma raises its own hard question. Does it mean the victims of genocide deserved their fate? Many teachers in both traditions reject that use of karma. They point out that karma is meant to guide one’s own conduct, not to judge other people’s suffering, and that compassion is the right response to suffering. Students should notice how morally intolerable the other reading would be, and why.

4. The choices people made

Neighbors acted under Nazi policy. The Holocaust was shaped not only by that policy, but by the choices of ordinary people.

4.1 Jedwabne, 10 July 1941

Jedwabne was a small market town in northeastern Poland, about half Jewish before the war. Soviet forces occupied it in 1939. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and within days the Soviets were gone and the Germans had arrived.

On July 10, 1941, Polish townspeople, with Germans present and encouraging, rounded up the town’s Jews in the market square. They humiliated them, made some of them carry a statue of Lenin, and beat and killed many. Accounts gathered later describe men from the town and nearby villages armed with clubs, axes, and iron bars. Some of the killers had done business with their victims; some had gone to school with them. A few Jews were murdered in the streets and in their homes. Families tried to hide in fields and cellars and were dragged out.

Then they drove the rest into a barn on the edge of town and set it on fire. The barn belonged to a local Pole. Men, women, children, and old people burned inside it. A handful escaped, some of them by hiding with Polish families. The people who did this were not strangers or soldiers from far away. They were neighbors who knew their victims by name.

The story was largely forgotten for decades; a postwar monument blamed the Germans. In 2000 the historian Jan T. Gross published a book about it, translated into English in 2001 as Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.³³ Gross built his account largely from testimony given to a Jewish historical commission after the war and from the records of a 1949 Polish trial of some of the killers. His book caused a national crisis of conscience in Poland. Many Poles thought of their country only as a victim of the war, which it was: Germany murdered millions of Polish citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish. Neighbors forced Poles to face the fact that a country can be a victim and still contain perpetrators. In July 2001, on the sixtieth anniversary, Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, went to Jedwabne and apologized in his own name and in the name of those Poles whose consciences were moved by the crime. Gross gave a figure of about 1,600 victims. Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) investigated, partly exhumed the site, and concluded in 2002–2003 that Poles carried out the crime with German inspiration, but that the number killed was much lower, at least 340.³⁴ How many died, and what the Germans did that day, remain disputed. Nazi responsibility does not disappear. The numbers are disputed. That neighbors did it is not.

4.2 Neighbors who rescued

Neighbors also rescued. In the 1930s and 1940s the Protestant villages of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in south-central France, around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, sheltered and smuggled to safety several thousand refugees, many of them Jewish children. Rescue there was organized action, not only sympathy: shelter, food, false papers, and help escaping. The pastors André and Magda Trocmé and Édouard Theis led the effort, but it depended on farmers and families who took strangers in. Not everyone carried the burden equally. The villagers remembered their own ancestors, Huguenots persecuted as a religious minority. Under Vichy, and later the Germans, helping could cost them their lives. In 1990 Israel honored the whole region.³⁵

Since 1963 Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, has recognized non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews as Righteous Among the Nations. As of January 1, 2024, Yad Vashem had recognized 28,707 people, among them 7,318 from Poland, the largest national group.³⁶ In the same district, in the village of Janczewko, Antonina and Aleksander Wyrzykowski sheltered seven Jews from the Jedwabne area for years, at the risk of their lives.

4.3 Obedience and situation: Milgram and Zimbardo

In July 1961, three months after the Eichmann trial opened, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began an experiment. Volunteers were told they were helping study learning and were asked to give electric shocks of increasing strength to a “learner,” actually an actor, whenever he made a mistake. In the best-known version, about two-thirds of participants went all the way to the highest level on the board, 450 volts, despite the learner’s protests, because a man in a lab coat told them to continue. Milgram published Obedience to Authority in 1974 and linked his results directly to Arendt.³⁷

Later research complicated the picture. Gina Perry’s study of the Yale archives (2012) found that experimenters often departed from the script and that many participants suspected the shocks were not real. Obedience rates varied widely across Milgram’s many versions. Still, partial replications, such as Jerry Burger’s in 2009, found that many people will go further than they expect.

In August 1971, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment assigned college students to be “guards” or “prisoners” in a mock prison. It was stopped after six days because some guards became abusive. For decades it was taught as proof that situations make people cruel. But in 2018 Thibault Le Texier, using the Stanford archives, showed that the guards had been coached toward toughness and that the study was not the neutral experiment it claimed to be.³⁸ Treat it as a cautionary story, not as evidence.

4.4 Browning versus Goldhagen

Lecture 1 told the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 at Józefów as Christopher Browning reconstructed it in Ordinary Men (1992). Browning concluded that the men killed mainly for situational reasons: conformity, careerism, deference to authority, the wish not to leave comrades to do the dirty work, along with the war and antisemitic propaganda.

In 1996 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen used many of the same records in Hitler’s Willing Executioners and came to the opposite conclusion. Ordinary Germans killed, he argued, because they shared an “eliminationist antisemitism” deeply rooted in German culture; they wanted to kill. The book was a bestseller and a sensation, especially in Germany. Most historians, Browning among them, criticized its use of evidence and its picture of a single German mindset. The debate is a version of this lecture’s question: are perpetrators made by situations, or by beliefs and choices, and how do the two interact? The phrase “Hitler’s willing executioners” is Goldhagen’s. Using it for Jedwabne’s neighbors is an echo of his argument, an application to another case, not a claim that Goldhagen wrote about Jedwabne.

4.5 Made, not born

The killers of Jedwabne and the rescuers of Le Chambon were the same kind of creature. Nothing in their biology divided them. They were divided by what they chose, and by what earlier choices had made them ready to choose. Monsters and saints are made, not born.

This is where the religious answers have been pointing all along. Augustine located evil in the will. Hick saw souls being made. Fackenheim spoke of a commandment, which only means something to beings who can obey or refuse. The great religions disagree about God, but nearly all of them locate the immediate source of evil in human choice. What philosophy asks is how that choosing works, and why it so often goes wrong. Evil was chosen. So was courage.

5. Kant’s radical evil

5.1 Before Kant: Hobbes and Rousseau

Lecture 1 explained how Thomas Hobbes used the unit’s epigraph. His fuller view of human nature appears in Leviathan (1651), chapter 13. Without a common power to keep them in awe, he argued, human beings live in a condition of war of every man against every man, in which the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” People are driven by competition, fear, and the desire for glory. Only a strong sovereign can restrain them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau answered in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). Hobbes’s “natural man,” he said, was really social man, already corrupted. In the state of nature human beings were simple, solitary, and moved by self-preservation and by pity, a natural reluctance to see others suffer. Corruption came with society: property, comparison, vanity, and inequality.

The Holocaust is uncomfortable for both. It happened inside one of the most orderly, lawful, educated states in Europe, which seems to refute Hobbes’s faith in the sovereign. And it was done with the tools of advanced civilization, which might seem to support Rousseau, except that the killers of Jedwabne used clubs and a barn.

5.2 A philosopher who kept his eye on evil

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) spent his whole life in Königsberg, Prussia. He is famous as the philosopher of reason and duty, who taught that the moral law commands every rational being unconditionally, and that we should act only on principles we could will to be universal laws. He called this rule the categorical imperative, and he set it out in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). He was no gloomy pessimist. But in 1793, at the age of sixty-nine, he published a book called Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, which opens with an essay on what he called radical evil.³⁹

5.3 Self-love above the moral law

Kant observed that all human beings know the moral law. We also all have natural desires, for comfort, approval, safety, and advantage, and these are not evil in themselves. Evil, for Kant, is a matter of order. Every person adopts a basic ranking of motives. A good person puts the moral law first and pursues self-love only within its limits. An evil person reverses the order: he follows the moral law only when it suits his self-love, and drops it when it does not.

Kant argued that human beings have a propensity to make this reversal, a built-in tilt toward putting ourselves first. He described three degrees of it: frailty, when we know the good and fail to do it; impurity, when we do the right thing for mixed motives; and wickedness, or perversity of heart, when we have made self-love our ruling principle.⁴⁰ Most human evil, he thought, is not dramatic. It is the quiet habit of excusing ourselves.

5.4 Why “radical”

“Radical” comes from the Latin radix, “root.” Kant did not mean “extreme.” He meant that this evil lies at the root of the will, at the level of the first principle by which we choose, so that it corrupts every choice made from it. It is not one bad deed but a twisted starting point.

5.5 Innate, yet our fault

Here Kant faced a puzzle. He called the propensity innate, found in everyone, even in the best of us. But if it is innate, how can we be blamed for it? Kant’s answer was that it is innate only in the sense that it is there as far back as we can trace our moral lives; it is not a physical inheritance like eye color. It is a choice, a deed of freedom, made at a level we cannot observe, so it is imputable: we are responsible for it.⁴¹ This is Kant’s philosophical version of what Christians call original sin, stripped of the story of Adam.

Because it is a deed of freedom, it can be undone. Kant insisted that the propensity cannot be uprooted by any outside force, but a person can overcome it through a “revolution” in his way of thinking, a fundamental reversal that restores the moral law to first place, followed by gradual reform of conduct.⁴² We ought to become better; therefore we can.

5.6 How character is made

Kant also saw that choices build on each other. Each time we put ourselves first and excuse it, the excuse becomes easier. Over time, consistent choices form a character, and a character makes certain choices feel natural and others unthinkable. This is the philosophical form of “made, not born.” For Kant, the person who walks into the barn at Jedwabne with a torch has been made by a long series of earlier choices, and is still responsible for every one of them.

6. Arendt and the banality of evil

6.1 A man in a glass booth

On May 11, 1960, Israeli agents seized a man named Ricardo Klement as he walked home from a bus stop in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nine days later they flew him to Israel. His real name was Adolf Eichmann. As head of the Gestapo office for Jewish affairs, he had organized the deportation of millions of Jews from across Europe to the ghettos and killing centers.

His trial opened in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961. Eichmann sat in a booth of bulletproof glass. More than a hundred witnesses testified, many of them survivors telling their stories in public for the first time; the trial was filmed and broadcast. The court convicted him in December 1961, and he was hanged on the night of May 31–June 1, 1962, the only person ever executed by the State of Israel after a civil trial.⁴³

In the press section sat Hannah Arendt. She was a German Jewish philosopher who had studied with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. She had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, fled to France, been interned in the Gurs camp in 1940, escaped, and reached New York in 1941. She went to Jerusalem for The New Yorker, and she went expecting to see a monster.

6.2 “Terribly and terrifyingly normal”

She did not see a monster. She saw a man who spoke in clichés and bureaucratic jargon, who seemed proud of his efficiency, who insisted he had personally nothing against Jews, and who said he had only done his duty. Six psychiatrists, she reported, had found him normal. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, appeared as articles in 1963 and then as a book. In its epilogue she wrote that the trouble with Eichmann was “precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”⁴⁴

At the end of her account of his execution she described his last words, a string of graveside clichés, and called them the lesson of “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”⁴⁵ “Banal” means commonplace, ordinary, trite. Arendt was not saying that what Eichmann did was ordinary. She was saying that the man who did it was.

6.3 The inability to think

What was wrong with Eichmann, Arendt concluded, was not hatred or sadism but thoughtlessness. He could not, she wrote, think from the standpoint of anyone else. By “thinking” Arendt meant something specific: the silent dialogue a person carries on with himself, in which he asks whether he can live with what he is doing.⁴⁶ Someone who never has that conversation can be made to do almost anything, provided it comes with orders, language rules, and a career. The Nazi bureaucracy gave Eichmann all three. “Final solution,” “evacuation,” and “special treatment” were words designed so that no one had to think about what they meant.

6.4 Superfluous human beings

Arendt had already written about the system that produced Eichmann. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she argued that totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Soviet alike, aim not merely at tyranny but at total domination. The camps were their laboratories. There, she argued, the regime tried to destroy first the legal person, then the moral person, and finally individuality itself, turning human beings into bundles of reactions. Its goal was to make human beings, as human beings, superfluous.⁴⁷ She saw that this happened to perpetrators as well as victims. A functionary who cannot think has also been made superfluous as a person.

6.5 Her answer to Kant

The book caused a storm. Many readers, among them her old friend the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, thought she had trivialized the Holocaust, made Eichmann seem less guilty, and been unfair to the Jewish councils in the ghettos. Scholem wrote to her in June 1963 accusing her of lacking love for the Jewish people. She replied in July 1963. In that letter she explained what she had come to think about evil, and it reads as a direct answer to Kant:

“It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. … Only the good has depth and can be radical.”⁴⁸ [verify wording and page against Arendt, The Jewish Writings (2007), “The Eichmann Controversy: A Letter to Gershom Scholem.”]

Arendt herself had used Kant’s term “radical evil” in Origins.⁴⁹ Now she took it back. Kant had found evil at the root of the will. Arendt found it on the surface, spreading through people who never went deep enough to ask what they were doing. That does not make it less dangerous. It makes it more dangerous, because it needs no monsters, only enough people who do not think.

Arendt never said that Eichmann was innocent. She agreed that he should hang. Her point was that the ordinariness of evil makes the obligation to think and judge more urgent, not less.

6.6 Eichmann before Jerusalem

In Eichmann before Jerusalem (German 2011; English 2014), the historian Bettina Stangneth studied the writings and taped conversations Eichmann produced among Nazi exiles in Argentina in the 1950s. They show a committed, proud antisemite, nothing like the colorless functionary Arendt saw in the courtroom. Many scholars now think Eichmann performed thoughtlessness at his trial to save his life. Whether that refutes the “banality of evil” as a general idea, or only shows that Arendt chose a poor example, is still debated.

7. Conclusion: memory and the courage to think

Josef Mengele, the SS doctor who selected prisoners for the gas chambers at Auschwitz and experimented on twins, held doctorates in anthropology and medicine. Shirō Ishii, who directed Japan’s Unit 731, was a trained physician. Education did not stop them; it made them more efficient. Education alone is not enough. What matters is an education that teaches people to think in Arendt’s sense, to judge, and to find the courage to act on that judgment, as the villagers of Le Chambon did.

The Hebrew Bible commands zakhor, “remember,” again and again. Yad Vashem, whose name comes from Isaiah 56:5 (NRSV), “I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name,” exists so that the dead will not be erased a second time. But memory is not only for the dead.

Return one last time to the parade ground at Buna. None of the answers we have heard, not Augustine’s, not Hick’s, not Rubenstein’s or Fackenheim’s, not Kant’s or Arendt’s, makes that boy’s death make sense. They are not meant to. What they can do is tell us where to look, at God and at ourselves, and what to do with what we have seen.

“If memory and history are not used for a better future, but only to re-enact the hostilities of a bad past, then none of us is doing our job.” (Carol Gluck, historian, spoken in a video interview)⁵⁰

Notes and Sources